Episode 26: Urban Legends pt 2 | Show Notes
Amanda’s Notes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creepypasta
https://time.com/2818192/creepypasta-copypasta-slender-man/
https://time.com/2818192/creepypasta-copypasta-slender-man/
We are back!!! Here we are with part two of our Urban Legend series. Let’s dive in.
So I mentioned last episode how modern day urban legends are by and large showing up on the internet, so I figured we would discuss some of those! I’ve left out the most obvious, Slenderman, because I want to do a real deep dive if I ever cover that. That would require two or three episodes of its own.
First, we’ll talk about Creepypastas. If you don’t know what a creepypasta is, it’s a brief, user generated story online intended to scare readers. These stories usually start out on forums where it’s understood that the stories are fiction, but they end up spreading out to the wider internet community and people start to believe they are true. Again, for an example of a creepypasta gone out of hand we see Slenderman.
There are four sub-genres of creepypasta that have grown organically as the stories appear. There are the Lost Episode creepypastas. These are stories of episodes of children’s shows that have the friend of a friend framing device twisted to something more like “does anyone else remember this episode of X tv show from the 80s/90s/insert target audience’s childhood”. In these stories you’ll get a description of an episode where either something creepy happens, like the famous Squidward suicide episode of Spongebob Squarepants creepypasta. You may get one where it’s a live action show but terrible things happened to the cast. Or terrible things happened to people who watched the broadcast, or remembering the episode leaves people feeling physically ill, etc.
Next we have the Video Game creepypastas. In these the stories center around video games with horrific elements, where the things happening in the games start spilling over into the realities of whatever characters are in the story. These can be caused by either supernatural elements or toxic AI issues. The most famous of these arguably being the Lavender Town Syndrome story, where the music from the Lavender Town part of Pokemon Red was leading to mass child suicides.
Next we have the psychotic killer creepypastas. These tell the story of someone bullied, or traumatized as a child and almost always left with a physical disfigurement of some sort who has a psychotic break and becomes a serial killer. The most notable of these would be Jeff the Killer, where the titular Jeff was bullied over and over, eventually beaten by his bullies and ending up in the hospital. After being released, Jeff slices his own face into a Joker smile and goes on a killing rampage, telling his victims “go to sleep” just before killing them.
And finally we have the supernatural monster creepypastas. These stories take monster ideas from traditional folklore and pop culture and rework them to fit the modern day. As these are stories on the internet, proceed with caution because I have run into several that do NOT treat these with any sort of cultural respect and some that are flat out offensive.
Now, I actually saw an interesting article from Time Magazine that in part, compared modern day creepypastas to chain letters and the chain emails that were everywhere in the days of dial-up internet. I just loved this line “chain emails were one of the first vehicles for web virality”.
I don’t have much in the way of connecting these to any more “traditional” urban legends, but I love that we are watching folklore unfold in real time and we have the tools to track the evolutions of these stories in real time.
Corinne’s Notes:
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_of_Kyiv
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/01/world/europe/ghost-kyiv-ukraine-myth.html
https://www.tnp.no/norway/panorama/5386-clown-craze-attack-spreads-to-norway/
https://www.usu.edu/today/story/usu-folklorists-say-creepy-clowns-2016-hottest-internet-trend
https://www.thelocal.no/20161012/creepy-clown-craze-puts-norwegians-on-edge/
https://www.vox.com/culture/2016/10/12/13122196/clown-panic-hoax-history
https://twitter.com/itolgensbakk/status/1570341262825488384
When Amanda put out the call recently asking for people’s favorite urban legends, Twitter fuckin’ DELIVERED. I owe a debt of gratitude in particular to Dr Ida Tolgensbakk, who told us about how the US Murder Clown legend had made its way to Norway, and then spread to Sweden as well. Obviously I had to do some googling and at least touch on the subject, right??
According to Dr Tolgensbakk, she first heard the story from her own kid in October 2016, before it started cropping up in papers around the country. Her daughter reported that a clown had killed a teen in the neighborhood. Later, reports started spreading that people were dressing as clowns and menacing others.
Now, in Norway at least, it does seem that people (especially teens) had heard about the creepy ass murder clowns and decided to scare the living daylights out of their neighbors. In response, some stores in the country stopped selling clown costumes entirely, says the translation of one newspaper that I read. In another English-language Norwegian news site, I read that teens in multiple cities were arrested after scaring folks whilst dressed as clowns, usually as their friends filmed on their phones.
In the US, in contrast, the VAST majority of creepy clown sightings were entirely fictitious. More people were arrested for filing false police reports than were people dressed as clowns doing illegal things. Not that people weren’t arrested for dressing up as clowns while doing illegal shit! Including here in Kentucky! Vox.com’s Aja Romano did a terrific write up when everything was going down, providing more context for the urban legend. This isn’t the first time that the creepy clown panic, or “Phantom Clowns”, as the phenomenon is better known as, has happened. It’s cropped up in cycles since the early 1980s.
Interestingly, since the creepy clown urban legends were big in 2016, members of the Digital Folklore Project at Utah State University actually posited that the terrifying carnies were being used to stand in as commentary surrounding the election, which is a take I am FASCINATED by (Side note, I also want to start following the Digital Folklore Project, because it sounds interesting as hell too).
I am now going to switch gears ALL THE WAY AROUND. Please get ready for some HELLA mood whiplash, because I found a very recent urban legend that’s been making the rounds.
In late February and early March of this year, a story started spreading around Ukraine about a fighter pilot who’d shot down at least six Russian aircraft during the first 30 hours of the attempted siege of Kyiv. Whomever this mystery pilot, known as the Ghost of Kyiv, was, they’d be the first certified Ace in decades. Air to Air combat just isn’t as frequent as it was during the First and Second World Wars. And the news was particularly triumphant during the extremely grim early days of the ongoing war on Ukraine.
Footage was even shared of the purported Ghost of Kyiv in combat, their MiG-29 outmaneuvering enemy planes.
Heck, even former Ukrainian president Poroshenko was tweeting about the Ghost of Kyiv. Some newspapers thought they’d even ID’d the pilot, believing it to be one Major Stepan Tarabalka (the New York Times notes that Major Tarabalka was an actual member of the Ukrainian armed forces who was killed in battle in March. He was 29 years old).
However, the world now knows as of April 30 of this year, the Ghost of Kyiv is just a legend. No such fighting ace actually exists. The story is as much propaganda as it is urban legend, but it filled a vital role in keeping spirits up amongst the citizens and soldiers of Ukraine in the face of an absolutely giant enemy
Plus misinformation of this type has played a vital role in the ongoing war efforts. Ukraine has been able to make massive inroads against Russia, pushing back the lines of the invading force.
Now, I had two primary reasons for wanting to discuss this story in particular. For one thing, it’s fascinating to see an urban legend that sprung up so recently, and because it’s important to continue paying attention to what’s going on in Ukraine. There’s so many concurrent tragedies going on in the world right now that it’s easy to lose sight of the ones that have been going on for awhile (looking at you, pandemic that still isn’t over, and the horrific flooding in Pakistan). But also, and this is so deeply nerdy of me, when I first saw it, I had an instant flashback to a short story I read as a young teen.
It was a story about the Blitz, and a group of English pilots being outmanned by Germans, when suddenly another formation of planes joined and turned the tide against the Germans. Over the course of the story, the POV character realizes that it’s actually King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table coming to guard Britain in its hour of need. I cannot at all remember the title of this story, and despite Googling the details I can remember I’ve never found the story again. But I remember reading it so clearly–sitting in the family room using the family computer in its computer hutch, so I had to have been no more than 15 or 16 when I read it.
But I had that same sense again when I was reading about the Ghost of Kyiv, raising spirits during Ukraine’s time of need.
